Pawnstorm Digital Press

I haven’t really gotten much writing done this past week. Which isn’t to say that I haven’t wanted to, but rather that I haven’t made enough time to do so (and to be fair, some of this is out of my control). In fact, as I have been consuming a bunch of short fiction, in the form of Diverse Energies, Podcastle, and Escape Pod (and then At The Mouth Of The River Of Bees and High-Tech Gothic), I have had a lot of ideas for stories, which is frustrating as I can only work on one at a time. One of the great thing about Speculative Fiction is that, once you read enough of it, the outlines of a great conversation begin to emerge (a similar phenomenon can be found in philosophy), and the more of that conversation that I see, the more I want to participate (and in the case of short fiction, the more attainable that participation is). At the moment, there really isn’t much to do about it, other than to make notes about the stories I want to write (which are great to have for when you sit down to write but aren’t able to come up with a story, by the way). But enough about that, this post is titled “A First Draft”.

Back when I first started to work on Broken Shores, while I was still figuring out how the world worked (I hadn’t figured out what to call it, if I recall correctly), I wrote a short story with the working title of “Assassination”. I liked this story, but Broken Shores went a different direction, and I shelved it. But I have always wanted to dust it off, and make it work, but every time I looked at it, I was daunted by how much would need to change (almost all of it). Well, fuck it. I’m going to make it work, and you get to see the process. Just remember that what follows is a ROUGH DRAFT, and will be full of errors (continuity, plot, grammar, and otherwise) and represents a direction that the Broken Shores setting could have gone, but didn’t. Really, I want you to go into this expecting less than nothing. If you continue to read beyond this point, you will never get those minutes of your life back, and I cannot be held responsible, so don’t bother asking. Also, although I dislike doing it, I’m going to put a page break after the first scene, which I hope doesn’t mess with the feed/email subscriptions, but if it does I’m sorry. Feedback is welcome, just keep in mind, there is much necrotic tissue that is already marked for removal. Without further ado:

Assasination (working title)

by Tom Dillon

FIRST DRAFT (“here there be errors”) / 6.27.2008 / approximately 6,200 words

“We must never forget our history, what our forefathers went through to ensure our safety.  We have become complacent, and there is nothing to stop another disaster from occurring.  My opponent insists that the time for caution is over, that the threat is past, but it is not.  If anything, it is greater than ever.”  Senator Burien’s words blended into the noise of the crowd as something else caught Devin’s attention.

The man was easy to spot, moving quickly through a crowd that seemed to sway sluggishly in Devin’s ramped-up state.   She didn’t bother to signal as she braced herself, the guards on the perimeter had already done so.  The guards on the stage with her noticed as well, and she heard a series of thunks from their crossbows just moments before a few quarrels embedded themselves in the man’s chest.

The bolts didn’t slow the man down, he kept on dodging through the crowd as one of his hands plucked the quarrels from his chest and the other drew a long knife.  The guards that were closest to Senator Burien bunched up, making a human wall in front of him.  Even if the assassin got through them, they would slow him down enough for Devin and the rest of the guards to do their jobs.

Then the assassin jumped.  His momentum carried him in a smooth arc over the guards’ heads.  He ducked his head and crossed his arms in front of him just in time for the metal plates on his forearms to deflect three or four more quarrels.

He landed to the left of the main bunching of guards, in between them and her.  He ricocheted off of them, heading straight for her.  For a moment, his face was nearly touching hers, and she could see the tinge of blue under a layer of powder.  Then she felt her dagger slide along one of his ribs.  It caught, then he shoved off of her causing the blade to snap off as she lost her balance.

Even ramped up as she was, it was over by the time she regained her feet.  Senator Burien was on the ground, the assassin’s knife protruding from his temple.  It wouldn’t matter how much Ve they pumped into him, there was no coming back from something like that.

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I haven’t really gotten much writing done this past week. Which isn’t to say that I haven’t wanted to, but rather that I haven’t made enough time to do so...

Regrettably, I will not be running ShoStoWriMo this year. I had hoped to, but the reality of the situation is that I wouldn’t be able to do it properly (I have an 8 month old son at home and am taking a trip in the middle of the month). I will not be putting up a forum, but I was planning on moving away from that anyway (keeping the spammers away was a itself a job). Still want to participate? The good news is that ShoStoWriMo isn’t a thing, its a protocol, to participate, all you have to do is write a short story this month. That being said, here is an idealized schedule if you want to follow one:

• May 1-9: Write the rough draft of your short story. Don’t worry about getting it perfect, just get it down. A good length to shoot for is 3,500 – 6,000 words, but shorter or longer works, too.
• May 10-17: Give feedback, get feedback. Spend a week away from your story, preferably reading and providing feedback for others who are doing the same.
• May 17-21: Revise. Take that feedback that you gathered and do a second draft. When you’re done, send it back out for more feedback.
• May 22-30: Polish and share. Do more drafts, get more feedback. Read some published short stories to see how others have done it in the past.
• May 31: Celebrate! Congratulations, you have a short story that has gone through the revision process and is ready to post, sell, publish, whatever you want to do with it.

Since I’m not setting up a forum, I went ahead and created a Facebook page for ShoStoWriMo to help people connect with other people. In the next couple of days, I might add a Google+ one as well.

I will be trying to participate, but due to time constraints, I’m setting a conservative goal of just writing a short story this month. I’ll keep you posted about how its going. Also, I plan on writing a couple of blog posts about the medium, so let me know if there’s anything in particular you’d like me to cover.

Regrettably, I will not be running ShoStoWriMo this year. I had hoped to, but the reality of the situation is that I wouldn’t be able to do it properly (I...

The Revolution Will Not Be Microwaved is up! I have published it at Amazon as well as Smashwords (which means that it should be available everywhere once it gets approved, but that might take a while. I had a great time writing this story, and when I went through to do a final edit, I realized that I had forgotten how much I enjoyed it. As usual, the most difficult part of the self-publishing process was writing up a brief description, but I’m pretty happy with how it turned out:

For Sam, working at the Future Shoppe is a study in absurdity. Every week, he receives a directive from home office, a new product display, store layout, or signage style. And in the middle of every week, the orders are countermanded, often only hours after they have been completed. One week, the set of contradictory directions never comes.

Something is rotten in Coeur d’Alene, the nerve center of the Future Shoppe. And so Sam, Rosa, and Isaiah are roped into a mission to find out what, or at least steal some office supplies. Each of them is looking for something different: Rosa is expecting zombies, Isaiah just wants to see an old friend who lives there and Sam wants some sauce for his Guinig Meat Snack. But what they will find is stranger than they could have ever imagined.

So go grab a sample from one of the aforementioned retailers or read the first bit on the TRWNBM page and enjoy!

P.S. – As for what’s next, if you’re curious, I hope to publish There Are No Words in late May or early June and after that I will hopefully get Caldera all polished up and ready to go.

The Revolution Will Not Be Microwaved is up! I have published it at Amazon as well as Smashwords (which means that it should be available everywhere once it gets approved,...

Sometime last year, I stumbled across a blog post about how Star Trek had prefigured the direction our language and culture is heading in. In essence, there was an episode that dealt with a race that communicated purely by metaphor, the author then compared this to the rise of memes and reaction gifs. Of course, these things were around long before that post was written, but it wasn’t until I read it that I saw the connection between memes and language. And now I can’t unsee it.

More and more, I see emails and facebook posts that consist of nothing but a meme or reaction gif. These things can be fun, and I know that I’ve spent my share of time looking at lolcats, but when they become a substitute for communication, I begin to worry. These things are sort of like the graphic equivalent of cliches. Both are useful for expressing a common sentiment to someone who shares the same cultural frame of reference to yourself, both make it difficult to say anything interesting, novel, or memorable. The main difference is that I would guess that there are fewer memes/reaction gifs than there are cliches, due to the higher cost of production and the shrinking half-life of popular culture phenomena.

To be clear, I am not worried that using memes and reaction gifs will start us on the slippery slope to complete illiteracy. Rather, I feel that their use constitutes a vocabulary of expression, and a small one at that. The capacity of expression of ideas and sentiments seems as though it could limit the occurrence of them, or put another way, if you cannot express something, how fully can you be said to experience it?

On the other hand, if you’re reading this, you speak the English language, and if those upstarts over at Oxford Dictionaries are to be believed, “there are, at the very least, a quarter of a million distinct English words, excluding inflections, and words from technical and regional vocabulary not covered by the OED, or words not yet added to the published dictionary”. This number likely also doesn’t include cool untranslatable words like fingerspitzengefühl, or neologisms (look at what Shakespeare did to the English language). Taken together and considering that most things will be expressed by a combination of words, and the possibilities appear to be virtually endless.

The Devil’s Advocate in me responds to all this by saying that creativity is often the result of artificial limitations, and so reducing our vocabulary to a handful of memes might actually act as a font of creative expression. I would have to disagree. As a culture, we use memes as a shorthand for complex ideas and sentiments, as a shortcut. Words, on the other hand, are hard to use well, much like representing three dimensional objects on a two dimensional medium. As such, it would seem that words are inherently more limiting, and thus more beneficial to creativity (which also helps to explain why we have a quarter million of them in the English language).

So the next time you feel the urge to reach for that comfortable meme, take a moment and do yourself and your culture a favor. Just put it into words. Don’t worry, we won’t run out any time soon.

Sometime last year, I stumbled across a blog post about how Star Trek had prefigured the direction our language and culture is heading in. In essence, there was an episode...

As I mentioned a couple of weeks ago, I need to get my act together and do something with some of the stories that I’m sitting on. So today I went ahead and did a cover for “The Revolution Will Not Be Microwaved”. I’m pretty happy with it, but may tweak it a bit before I’m ready to stamp FINAL on it (naturally, feedback is welcome). Other than that, I need to take another pass through the story and format it for Smashwords and Amazon. Hopefully I’ll be ready to go with it early next week. I’ll let you know.

As I mentioned a couple of weeks ago, I need to get my act together and do something with some of the stories that I’m sitting on. So today I...

When we talk about organizing and organization, we often think about it in terms of optimizing an existing organizational structure. This is all well and good, but the concept of organization has become so ingrained in our culture and language that it is often assumed as a given and little thought is given to what it means to organize and how the resulting order differs from disorder. So I’m going to do some thinking out loud on the subject.

First, what is organization? Following the word’s etymological trail leads one eventually to the greek organon which apparently translates literally to “that with which one works”. In short, organizing is the act of creating something that is useful, an infrastructural element of getting things done. One could think of it as the fundamental aspect of toolmaking. All of this is good if you’re making a musical instrument (something else that pops up when looking into the history of the word), but how does it function when applied to people? Sure, forming a task force to get something done fits the notion, but a couple of interesting ideas come from it:

1. Organization is a multiplier of force. For example, take a mob of people who want to effect some sort of change. As a mob they have certain amount of ability to influence the world. Now, arm the mob, give them all guns. The mob has exactly one more option, violence (and even that isn’t really anything new, any mob is capable of violence with or without weapons, arming them just makes that option more effective and more likely). Okay, so go back to the original, unarmed mob. Instead of giving them weapons, organize them. Get them talking to each other, have them work out what it is they want and delegate tasks to individuals or subgroups. All of a sudden, the mob (although it is no longer a mob, really) has as many options as it has ideas, and the amount of ideas in proportion to its size. Instead of adding to its options, the mob has multiplied them. This is specifically why governments are leery of any well-organized group, they are more dangerous than an armed crowd ever could be.
2. Mindset. Unorganized groups (and individuals within the group) approach problems from the perspective of the individual, organized groups (and individuals within the group) approach problems from the perspective of the group. This may not sound like a big deal, but it is in fact the difference between powerlessness and power. Many of the issues that we find troubling in our world are not problems at the individual level but problems at the neighborhood, town, state, national, or world level. Dealing with problems on those scales as an individual is difficult, if not impossible (which is why superheroes seem to be such a dangerous fantasy to me, almost no one can deal with those problems on an individual level).

All of this is not to say that there aren’t problems with organization. Take for example the Stanford Prison Experiment, which suggests that it is possible for our individuality to be overridden by group identity. Despite this, I don’t honestly believe that there is a better option, yet.

In short, organization is a process by which useful things are created, multiplying the options of a group and providing the potential for hope against long odds.

So why am I going to the trouble of working all of this out? Aside from the subject being interesting in its own right, I’ve wanted to write something about organizing in a post-privacy society, and so this post was a necessary prerequisite. I’ll try to get that (more interesting, I promise) post written in the next week or two.

When we talk about organizing and organization, we often think about it in terms of optimizing an existing organizational structure. This is all well and good, but the concept of...

Back when I worked in a bookstore, I would frequently hear the following sort of exchange between my co-workers. One of them had been asked where the bibles are kept, and told the other that they had been tempted to tell the person that they should look in fiction. Both of them would have a good laugh. Even though I’m not a Christian (not even close), I always got a bit offended (but, to my shame, never said anything). Now, I’ll be the first person to say that if you can’t poke fun at your religion (or handle others doing so), you might want to consider changing it. But the fact is that for anyone who spends much time thinking about it, coming to terms with your own mortality is one of the most important and difficult things that you will do in your lifetime. Belittling someone else’s choice on this matter is not a sign of enlightenment, but rather of insecurity and immaturity.

Of course, reading the above paragraph puts me in mind of the stereotypical retiree waving his cane at a group of teenagers and telling them, “Get off my lawn!”. Then again, if that is the price of tolerance, so be it.

Back when I worked in a bookstore, I would frequently hear the following sort of exchange between my co-workers. One of them had been asked where the bibles are kept,...

Last May, for ShoStoWriMo I wrote a short story titled The Revolution Will Not Be Microwaved, an element of which was the rise of Guinea Pigs as a common food in the US (as one friend said, “I think of that story every time I see a Guinea Pig now.” Sweet savory success.). According to NPR, it seems that I was ahead of my time. Which reminds me, I need to put together a cover for that story and publish it, so that you can read it.

Last May, for ShoStoWriMo I wrote a short story titled The Revolution Will Not Be Microwaved, an element of which was the rise of Guinea Pigs as a common food...

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote a post about some of the issues that arise when a for-profit company offers a free service. A week later, as if to prove my point, it was announced that Amazon has purchased Goodreads. There has been quite a bit of outcry about this, ranging from indifference to outrage. I’m somewhere in the middle. I think that there is a value in an independent social book review site that is incompatible with a retail-owned version of the same. But the change will be gradual, and there will be plenty of time for something else to come about (and perhaps something even better). In short, I won’t be deleting my account, but I will be keeping my eyes on the horizon.

But what do I mean about the values of Goodreads being incompatible with ownership by amazon? Well, the reviews on Amazon suck, and they suck for a simple reason: there is money to be made, and so reviews are posted that reflect not the opinions of actual consumers but rather the purchased opinions of whoever stands to make money when you choose this book over that book (not Amazon, who doesn’t care which book you buy so long as you buy a book, preferably both books). Although Goodreads no doubt has this same dynamic present, it is much less pervasive, as the site was focused on the readers, not selling the books.

On another topic, what I find really interesting about this is that the value of Goodreads was largely created by the users. Users wrote the reviews, rated the books, categorized the books, and Goodreads’ part in all this was largely that of facilitator. And yet, when they sell, the money goes to the facilitator, not the people responsible for most of the value (Amazon could have written similar software for far less than what they no doubt paid for GR, what they were paying for was the stuff you and I put in). Now, this isn’t to say that users weren’t compensated for any of this, when you receive a free service, that can be viewed as a form of compensation.

So what to do if you care more about the service than the compensation? Well, you’ll just have to pay for it.

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote a post about some of the issues that arise when a for-profit company offers a free service. A week later, as if to...

Although I’ve been trying to get in the habit of writing a blog post each week, the laptop on which I write has had an accident. That being said, I do have a couple of updates for you. I’ve been working on a YA short story, and I recently passed the 7,000 word mark, so the rough draft should be done soon. Second, I’ve been making notes for the Broken Shores story that I’m working on, and even came up with something that might work as an epigram for it: “The danger is, as always it has been, that in our reaction to violence we not only become incapable, but also undeserving of peace.” It will probably change, but it fits the story, so not too much. Finally, it is April, which means that May is coming up, and I have decided that I will run the Short Story Writing month again. However, since setting up and moderating a forum has been a pain in the ass (and time suck) I’ll probably do it as a Facebook or G+ group this year. More news on that in the next couple of weeks.

Update: I went ahead and made a Facebook page, this year all things ShoStoWriMo will be at http://www.facebook.com/ShoStoWriMo. Although, there isn’t much there now, there will be soon.

Although I’ve been trying to get in the habit of writing a blog post each week, the laptop on which I write has had an accident. That being said, I...